I Need You To Listen To…

225.Song:I Fall In Love Too Easily

Artist:Chet Baker

Album:Chet Baker Sings  

For a song that has become a jazz standard performed by hundreds of artists, ever since Frank Sinatra first sung it in 1945, nobody has matched its alchemical energies quite like Chet Baker. His hauntingly feminine voice doesn’t just embody the lyrics, he haunts the headspace of anyone getting over a heartbreak. “I fall in love too terribly hard/ For love to ever last”, while this would be called love bombing today and possibly even frowned upon, Chet’s delivery absolutely breaks the barriers to empathy with the way his voice just falls upon every syllable, the melancholia that drips off of every word “My heart should be well-schooled/ ‘cause I’ve been fooled in the past”. Here is a jazz song that, through its perfection in delivery, defies convention, breaks through the mere boundaries of genre to become what every performer wants in their catalogue: A timeless classic.

224.Song:Entertain

Artist:Sleater-Kinney

Album:The Woods

The music industry is rife with artists struggling to reconcile their artistic impulses with the suffocating corporatism and critical gatekeeping that infest it. Sleater Kinney is one of those artists. “Entertain” is also a massively muscular explosive tirade. There is no reconciliation for this band, on this song, with this sound. “If you’re here because you want to be entertained/ Go away/ Please go away” Opening with Janet Weiss’s pummeling lead-in drums and guitars that sound vaguely threatening and cinematic at the same time, Carrie Brownstein’s lead vocal carries us off into a world of howling rage. Her voice goes from full throated screams to rhythmic yelps, careening towards a chorus of sycophantic redress. Released in a time before nostalgic reminiscence overwhelmed pop culture, lines like “Nostalgia, you’re using it like a whore/ It’s better than before/ it’s better than before” can’t help but maintain their relevance.

223.Song:Adam’s Song

Artist:Blink 182

Album:Enema Of The State 

The theory that “Adam’s Song” was inspired by an actual suicide letter sent to the band has long been debunked, but it’s understandable how people would come to that conclusion given how detailed the lyrics are about a boy feeling his way through his options in life. It was actually written as a metaphor for Mark Hoppus’s depression while the other two members of the band had girlfriends as he suffered alone [1]. Regardless, this is one of the most emotionally charged pop-punk songs ever written, with Mark successfully capturing the feelings of someone driven to a major suicide attempt “I’m too depressed to go on/ You’ll be sorry when I’m gone”. With Travis Barker’s compassionate drumming powering us through, and Mark Delonge’s guitars subsiding to allow Hoppus’s verses to shine, the song eventually soars to a life-affirming climax “Days when I still felt alive/ We couldn’t wait to get outside/ The world was wide”.

222.Song:Fight For Your Right

Artist:Beastie Boys

Album:Licensed To Ill 

I’m running a lot of risk here. Yes, yes, I know, “Sabotage” is just sitting there, begging for my appreciation. “Intergalactic”’s cosmic flows are forever worming their way into my skull and any of the songs off of Paul’s Boutique are objectively better crafted than this clumsy, juvenile, anthem. But can we just sit back and appreciate the absolute gall here? This is a song with no actual aspirations to meaning, just a showcase for each of the Beastie Boys personalities amidst a very dated metal mixture. It’s not revolutionary, it just rocks, unapologetically. We need more songs like it, frankly. The chugging guitar riffs in the verses are like audible winding springs, coiling up the steel for maximum impact until the mandatory solo. It’s like the Boys are capturing the fading energies of a gilded age, like the boys on Wayne’s World forever holding off the mid-life crisis. An absolutely adorable, frantically spastic, good time.

221.Song:Voodoo Child (Slight Return)

Artist:The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Album:Electric Ladyland 

Jimi Hendrix is either the greatest guitar player in the history of the instrument, or he isn’t. He is a binary all unto himself. The key to his greatness was not technical perfection, or even wild leaps in songwriting, but his sheer dynamism on the fretboard. Listening to him cut loose, as he does here, is like being the flames on his stratocaster, always hot, never in danger of going out with a whimper, incandescent. The signature Wah-wah’s here serve like an oil slick leading up to the explosive verses. Credit to the producer though, who knew to juice up his playing style with frantic spasms of stereo pans and volume fluctuations, said producer…Jimi himself. If he hadn’t died so prematurely, the ensuing decades of popular music might have been more experimental, more dynamic and unpredictable. But what we have here is pure alchemy on the guitar, spinning gold out of the pickups. No one has come close to equalling his virtuosity since.

220.Song:Fallin’

Artist:Alicia Keys

Album:Songs In A Minor 

“Sometimes I feel good/ Sometimes I feel used”. Anyone who’s been in a turbulent relationship can relate to the tortured emotional swings that accompany the undulating tides of torrid love. Alicia Keys wanted to write a song that embodied those feelings but with a youthful focus, to highlight that adolescents can and do go through the same whipsawing passions.She thus infuses every note she sings with the kind of assured grace that old R&B pros used to conjure, providing a steady hand at the wheel, guiding us through the storm. Aside from writing, she also produced “Fallin’”, making sure that every instrument packed a sonic punch, particularly the drums which I adore for the propulsive kicks and muted hi-hats. Even if Alicia Keys finds herself singing “I keep fallin’ in and out/ Of love with you” there are no plausible circumstances where a listener would tire of this song, of her, of our youthful energies made manifest here.

219.Song:Cactus Tree

Artist:Joni Mitchell

Album:Song To A Seagull 

Sometimes an artist gets it right the first time, as Joni Mitchell did here, on her debut album. The warmth of the acoustic guitars, recorded by David Crosby, is an ideal bed for lyrics that approach epic status as its female subject woos and is wooed, loves and loses love. Seriously, you can’t tell me you can hear “There’s a man who’s been out sailing/ In a decade full of dreams” and not desire to find out what’s about to happen? Joni’s performance alternates between rhythmic bluntness and serene highs, its dynamics are often breathtaking with how many shifts in emotional yearning can be heard. Little touches, like when she is doubled and then tripled, with each backing track singular in its musical purpose and place in the mix. With all of the praise that surrounds her later work, I humbly ask that you dedicate some time listening to this, one of the best tracks in her legendary discography. “She’s so busy being free”.

218.Song:Time To Pretend

Artist:MGMT

Album:Oracular Spectacular 

The curious thing about imagination is how precarious it is, how fragile our recollections can be of those quicksilver moments of creativity. If you don’t take care to note things down, to transcribe that music from your head, you can easily forget and lose sight of what’s important. I think this is why MGMT pushed the volume knobs as high as they could go on Oracular Spectacular, and then pushed their compressors even further, it was to prove a point. They didn’t want you to forget; about the creative impulse, the memories that spark vivid imaginariums. These synths are the most possibly massive they could be so that your brain has no ability to shunt that aside. Lyrics like “We’re fated to pretend” go hand in hand with stories of how people gave up, lost their way, let memories drift away. All to set up “Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do?”. As Shia Lebouf famously meme’d “Do it! Don’t let your dreams be dreams!”.

217.Song:Alright

Artist:Kendrick Lamar

Album:To Pimp A Butterfly

Is it too early to recognize To Pimp A Butterfly as one of the absolute top tier, top three, albums of all time? Three songs from it appear on this playlist in some shape or form.  It’s an album that runs the audience through so much masterly material that it becomes a dizzying experience. Emblematic of its whiplash nature is “Alright”, a song that defies convention, tosses it aside for the purpose of confrontation. Those famously stop-start vocals are hype enough on their own terms, but within this context they come to symbolize the constant back and forth nature of despair; acknowledging the fact that our society dangles carrots in front of racial minorities and expects them to be grateful for the opportunity. “Wouldn’t you know/ We been hurt, been down before, N***a”. With Pharrell Williams lending his quirky everyman aura to a serious subject in the chorus, Kendrick Lamar has once again left the door open for our own introspection.

216.Song:Not A Pretty Girl

Artist:Ani DiFranco

Album:Not A Pretty Girl 

Enmeshed  as we are in a generation of feminist resurgence, this song has become more relevant than even during its initial release. Starting off harsh and sarcastic, Ani Difranco slags off all would be male condescension and faux-heroics “Wouldn’t you prefer a maiden fair?/ Isn’t there a kitten stuck up a tree somewhere?”. What’s remarkable is how much mileage she gets from very blunt guitar chords and nothing else but stark drums as her backdrop. Skimming through the Genius notes on her lyrics page, one gets the sense that this song, in all of its compact fury, is the perfect encapsulation of all of the grievances feminists have with the way society is constructed today. Even with all of its barely contained rage, it does find time to allow some hope to shine in near the end “I don’t really want to be a pretty girl/ No, I want to be more than a pretty girl”. Then a cascade of her vocals, answering each other in the stereo field, lets us off easy.

215.Song:B.O.B.

Artist:Outkast

Album:Stankonia 

Listening to “B.O.B” is like trying to wrestle with anxiety. Are we really expected to keep up with this song’s blistering musical and lyrical paces? Are we supposed to glean meaning from lines like “Don’t pull the thang out/ unless you plan to bang/ (Children’s chorus singing) Bombs Over Baghdad”? As with many songs on this playlist, it’s all in the energy, the vibes, the hustle on display. Andre admitted to wanting to capture the fiery energies of Rage Against The Machine, and it definitely sounds like it. Frantic funk guitars clash with bleeping synths and frenetic horn sections, those horns seem like they’re desperately trying to keep ahead of things, forever chasing something unattainable. Big Boi’s verse is an achievement in syllabic efficiency, keeping pace with the mania around him. Every time I listen to this song I get overwhelmed by its sheer chaotic velocity, nothing remains certain within this frantic swirl of musical alchemy.

214.Song:Black Dove

Artist:Tori Amos

Album:From The Choir Girl Hotel 

“On the other side of the galaxy!” It’s not a stretch to say that Florence Welch took copious notes from Tori Amos, an artist who had a knack for intimately large personal anthems. She also had a way of making piano keys sound like coiled snakes, waiting for their chance to pounce, laced with venom. “They are my kin”. The breadth of recording details on display here is awesome to behold,  it feels like literally everything and the kitchen sink has been thrown somewhere into this tempest, without compromising clarity. It really does seem like you can pick out any element you want and ride it down with Tori as she lets some personal demons loose in the woods. The overall effect is of a cinematic horror movie trailer’s song, an A24 film’s propulsion. Her vocals writhe around the notes, only finding solid footing in the choruses, and even then you get the feeling she could take things further, if necessary. Thankfully, there is no need.

213.Song:I’m With You

Artist:Avril Lavigne

Album:Let Go 

For a track off of her first album, Avril Lavigne accomplished something with this song that precious few artists can manage through an entire career, let alone how soon and how finely she managed. A desperate longing for human connection forms the foundations “Won’t you take me by the hand/ Take me somewhere new”, and a massive pop-rock soundscape, unique to a ten year period in music from roughly 1996-2006, allows it all to soar. I won’t hear slander as to the authenticity of music made in this era of music. All I care about is what I hear, and “I’m With You” just hits that “long walk on the bridge” feeling that nothing else can. Imagining the dusky sky, you walking unsteadily in the crisp air as uncertain existence just happens all around you. Little wonder that its stature has been steadily growing ever since. When Avril sings “I don’t know who you are/ But I’m/ I’m with you”, she lets all those pent up emotions of youth out.

212.Song:Everything In Its Right Place

Artist:Radiohead

Album:Kid A 

The book Back To Save The Universe, by Jack Donehy, contains a fascinating insight into just how this song sucks you into its dark milieu, stating that it is “dramatic in the way of Beethoven’s Ninth”. Approaching this song from that orchestral, rather than the literal lyrical, method produces an astounding sense of appreciation as to how its interlocking, coldly placed, rhythms operate. Every change in how the electronics interact with Thom Yorke’s heavily processed, torn apart, and recombined vocals is a mini revelation, the coldly clinical bass lines and processed pianos pinging around the soundscape with impunity. The title of the song is as much declarative as it is just a function of the jarring musical shifts on display. “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon”  functions exactly as John Lennon’s “I Am The Walrus”, leaving you alone, wondering “What the hell was that?”.

211.Song:Murder Was The Case (DeathAfterVisualizingEternity)

Artist:Snoop Dogg & Nigga Daz

Album:Doggystyle 

Viewing Snoop Dogg now as an artist, after decades of flanderization of his former gangsta rap image, you do wonder if there were missed opportunities to capitalize more on his sideways flows. A clear precursor to later artists such as Kid Cudi, his early-to-mid 90’s output, laced with G-funk synths, was immaculate, with this song proving the greatest monument to his talents. Flirting with multi-media success even at this early stage of his career, he would release a short film based on this song a mere year later, the cinematic doom crawl of the music behind his rapping is rich bedding for fire bars. When he makes a deal with the devil to come back to life, there is no hesitation, just a haunting acknowledgement “Close your eyes, my son/ My eyes are closed”. Ironically enough, this song interpolates from the same material as Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, with the nursery rhyme segments peppered throughout. Seductive Darkness in G-funk form.

210.Song:Ready Or Not

Artist:The Fugees

Album:The Score 

Game recognizes game. The Fugees certainly saw in Enya’s “Boadicea” a viable energy to crib for their own purposes. [1] Slowing down a few hums allows for “Ready Or Not” to have a ghostly undercurrent to Lauryn Hill’s declaration “You can’t hide/ Gonna find you/ and Take it slowly”. Perhaps not surprising for such a singular talent, Hill manages to outrap both Pras and Wyclef Jean, containing rapid-fire sequences such as “I’ll hex you with witches brew if you’re doo-doo/ Voodoo, I can do what you do, easy” in her verse, while the best bar either can manage is a trite “dance around the border like Cassius Clay”. Maybe this is why Lauryn raps “While you’re imitation’ Al Capone/ I’ll be Nina Simone”, her talent just shines so much in comparison. Still, the potent energy contained in that sample allows for The Fugees to sound like a world-class crew.You can find ghostly echoes of this song in modern R&B/hip-hop by the likes of Drake.

209.Song:Oh! Pretty Woman

Artist:Roy Orbison

Album:Oh! Pretty Woman 

2:59 of pop-rock brilliance, with a charisma so potent that an entire blockbuster movie could coast off of its latent energies. Roy Orbison had a voice that could make angels cry. Just listening to the way his falsetto, one of the best natural instances in music history, drapes itself over every word is enough to induce serenity. The result is uncanny, a song formed like a peach sorbet, scooped perfectly into the cone, a shining, timeless beacon into a time and place resting outside of context but always within reach of memory. “Pretty Woman, talk a while” is just the sort of lyric that pops up in every man’s mind when basking in a pretty woman’s aspect. The entire production pops like a soda fizz, the guitars, the glistening pianos, the drums that pound with the urgency and intensity befitting of a love being born. It’s giddy enough that when the final “Pretty Woman” is sung, and the reverb fades out, you can’t help but feel a hole in your heart, begging for a replay.

208.Song:Intuition

Artist:Feist

Album:The Reminder 

Leslie Feist’s The Reminder is an entire album borne aloft by oceans of silence, the spaces between her lines embellishing things already said and yet to be known. And sometimes a song comes on that carries you along its tides, content to fade in and out of your consciousness like a lucid dreamscape. “Intuition” is that song from this greatest of albums, an emotional journey that can’t help but drift towards… something, anything at all. Her enigmatic lyricism is couched by a gorgeous vocal performance with its own peculiar momentum. Consider lines like “And you choose, you chose/ poetry over prose”, where her voice circles back, unsure of itself. But when she reaches that denouement “And it’s impossible to tell/ How important someone was”, the words might be unclear, but the emotions are as clear as they are overpowering. A small chorus accompanies her as she ends the song on “Did I, Did I miss out on you?”. Don’t miss out on this.

207.Song:Peace Sells

Artist:Megadeth

Album:Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying? 

I’m going to preface this blurb by desperately pleading with you to listen to the original mix. Not the Randy Burns mix, or the 25th Anniversary edition mix, the original in all of its caustic glory. Megadeth at its best was a punk band that did guitar solos, and Dave Mustaine could angst with the best of them. Here he rages against wars, the government and religion, all the hits. What separates this from the metal chaff is how muscular, incendiary the guitars are. Mixed so that the thrashing chords sound like somebody knocking down your door in each ear, with a bass guitar holding nothing back in the center, they pummel the listener into submission so Mustaine can preach with his growling vocal snarls. It’s not as bleak as you would assume as he definitely has a sense of humour about it all “What do you mean I don’t pay my bills?/ Why do you think I’m broke? Huh?”. A punk band that does thrash guitar solos, not a bad mix.

206.Song:White Room

Artist:Cream

Album:Wheels Of Fire

When Eric Clapton joined forces with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, the world knew that some magic was going to be produced. Yet, nothing could have prepared the world, then and now, for this song. “White Room” is an explosive romp through blues-rock songcraft, with some psychedelia thrown in for good measure. It opens with a bombastic, string-laced, intro, almost like a spaghetti western introducing its tragic hero. Eric Clapton’s virtuoso guitar sears its way through the structures of the song, existing like a flame serpent, flailing around like it’s about to set everything alight. Bruce’s bass guitar and vocals gamely hold their own and Ginger keeps events from drifting apart with his stellar drumming. Cream was lightning in a bottle, throwing three enormous talents together at the height of their powers, little wonder that none of its members managed to make anything this vibrant, this iconic, afterwards.

205.Song:What’s Love Got To Do With It

Artist:Tina Turner

Album:Private Dancer 

Is this what people want when they say they yearn for maturity? Wisdom passed down through musical forms and vocal fry? Tina Turner had had a celebrated music career before this, when her voice was full of pep and could pop a high note without seeming to bring her whole throat to the party. Here, she sounds like years of accumulated damage, a smoker’s lung given a vocal chord. “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken” she sings at the end, sounding for all the world like her body is going to give out, like late era Billie Holiday. What’s the appeal? Producer Terry Britten knew the answer. Crafting a sonic atmosphere akin to immersing yourself in a local dive bar, with muted guitars, cheap sounding synth flutes opening like drifting cigarette smoke, even the string swells sound cribbed from a thrift store keyboard. All this so Tina Turner can sing “What’s love but a second hand emotion?”. I suspect people prefer things this way.

204.Song:Hey Bo Diddley!

Artist:Bo Diddley

Album:Bo Diddley 

Listen to how much excitement the background singers are generating for Bo Diddley, they aren’t about to let such things as recording quality stop them from hyping the big man up. They are giving it their all, peaking the microphones, the notes escaping their mouths un-herded. All this for a man who scoffs at our notions of songwriting forms, he is going to give you one, maybe two chords, and you are going to like it. A man who has an entire musical rhythm named after him and him alone. This song is the perfect encapsulation of everything that made him such a seminal figure in popular music: From the heedless momentum of that signature rhythm, to the roughshod way his lyrics circle back to his favorite subject; himself. “Bo Diddley done had a farm/ On that farm he had some women/ Women, women, women everywhere”. If you aren’t suppressing an ear-to-ear grin at this intro lyric, you ain’t buying what Bo Diddley is selling.

203.Song:Photograph

Artist:Def Leppard

Album:Pyromania 

Producer Mutt Lange really came out of the Def Leppard recording sessions as a genius, taking a band that really, really, really, needs ample studio time to get a decent sounding end product and making it spectacular. Pyromania is one of the most expensive albums ever recorded (an eye-watering 4 367 000 in today’s money [1]) and, listening to lead vocalist Joe Elliot’s vocals, you wonder how on earth that number isn’t higher. Regardless, Mutt polished the band’s sound into a glistening sheen, allowing the admittedly strong songwriting to shine at its absolute brightest. “Photograph”’s guitars are stadium-sized, soaring as high as the production will let them. Rick Allen’s reverb-gated drums are as powerful as they are pinned to that era in time. If you are wondering how this song flourishes on this playlist next to all that came before it, with my ample criticism, well, sometimes you just need to polish a song until it shines like a diamond.

202.Song:Jesus Walks

Artist:Kanye West

Album:The College Dropout 

“The way that Kathy Lee needed Regis/ That’s the way I need Jesus”. Kanye West’s flavour of rap has been called maximalist, both in its sound which is expansive and unrelenting and in its lyrical aspirations. He is a man who can pull off a rap song about praising Jesus and have it top the charts, simply because he truly believes in the Greatest aspects of greatness. His ability to collate very disparate samples, combining The ARC Choir’s “Walk With Me”’s eerie chants with some reassembled drums from Lou Donaldson’s version of “Ode To Billie Joe”, into a powerful, unstoppable, militaristic march, is a treat for the ears. Even if the bouncing “N*****s” samples from a Curtis Mayfield song grate, they are at least on message for West’s particular brand of braggadocio. He embellishes his delivery on certain lines with a murderously clever sense of propulsion, letting nothing get in his way. “The only thing I pray is that my feet don’t fail me now”.

201.Song:If I Was Your Girlfriend

Artist:Prince

Album:Sign O’The Times

Here is a song that almost literally sounds like it’s keeping a secret from you. Just listen to that synth pad that plays throughout, hovering around the lyrics like someone about to leap from the shadows just to say “Here I am!”. It never does, and thus we are not privy to things we should not know. Looking through the credits for this song is like reading an itemized list of genius playing off of itself; Writer: Prince, every instrument: Prince, Recording engineer: Prince. This is a man whose talents were bountiful, who could innovate in songwriting and technical craft like few others. He was one of the few artists capable of translating what was in his head into our ears, without compromises. This allows him to write a song where he is jealous of a friendship between two women and not come off as a psychotic asshole, even if that absolutely was the intent. When the lines between genius and madness are blurred, lean toward the genius.